Open Educational Resources: Psychology

Find open educational resources (OER) available to lower or eliminate the cost of textbook content for any course at Indian River State College. Find open access materials including alternative textbooks, public domain resources, and creative commons lice

Open Textbooks

Charles Stangor's Introduction to Psychology utilizes the dual theme of behavior and empiricism to make psychology relevant to intro students. Charles wrote this book to help students organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual level.

Instruction in Functional Assessment introduces learners to functional assessment (FA), which includes a variety of assessment approaches (indirect, observational, and experimental) for identifying the cause of an individual’s challenging behavior for the purpose of designing effective treatments. FA is mandated by federal law and is a recognized empirically based approach to treatment of individuals with challenging behaviors (e.g., disruptive, self-injurious, and aggressive behaviors). Instruction in FA is essential for students who will one day enter professions as educators, psychologists, social workers, counselors, or mental health professionals.

This textbook is based on a critical thinking approach, and its aim is to get students thinking actively and conceptually – with a greater focus on the forest than the trees. Yes, there are right and wrong answers, but the answers are not the only thing. What is perhaps even more important is how students get to the answers – the thinking process itself.

Psychology is designed to meet the scope and sequence for the single-semester introduction to psychology course. For many students, this may be their only college-level psychology course. As such, this textbook provides an important opportunity for students to learn the core concepts of psychology and understand how those concepts apply to their lives. The authors strive to make psychology, as a discipline, interesting and accessible to students. A comprehensive coverage of core concepts is grounded in both classic studies and current and emerging research, including coverage of the DSM-5 in discussions of psychological disorders. The text incorporates discussions that reflect the diversity within the discipline, as well as the diversity of cultures and communities across the globe.

While Research Methods in Psychology is fairly traditional— making it easy for you to use with your existing courses — it also emphasizes a fundamental idea that is often lost on undergraduates: research methods are not a peripheral concern in our discipline; they are central. The overarching goal of this textbook is to present the basics of psychological research methods — focusing on the concepts and skills that are most widely shared within the discipline — emphasizing both their centrality to our field and their contribution to our understanding of human behavior.